Education reporter John Merrow '59 offers his insights on teaching and learning during the challenging times of COVID-19.
While we can't know what the world will look like in the aftermath of the current pandemic, we know that our basic needs and drives will be unchanged. From my perspective, and from Taft's, the education of our young must take center stage.
School closings have fundamentally altered the landscape. With schools closed and parents engaging in "home learning" with their children, we can no longer ignore the yawning divide between rich and poor and—too often—between white and non-white in America.
Resources are part of the solution, of course, but we need a paradigm shift. Educators must learn to look at each individual student and ask, How is this child intelligent? because every child has skills and abilities deserving of development.
Post-pandemic, it is completely inappropriate to continue asking How smart are you? and then formulate answers based on test scores. That's the MO of a "sorting system," and if America is to recover, we must offer all children multiple chances to achieve their potential.
To be blunt, it's time to stop thinking like educators whose mantra all too often is "I taught it, but they didn't learn it." Instead, those charged with teaching need to think like a librarian, a swimming instructor, a highway engineer, or a gardener. Let me explain:
Librarians do not have a captive audience. After all, no one is required to attend the library. To survive and prosper, librarians have had to identify their audiences and find ways to appeal to them, to draw them into their buildings or electronic networks. For the most part, they've succeeded, and without pandering.
With school buildings shuttered, students do not have to "attend" anything. They can log on to classes to get credit for "being there," but there's no way for the teachers to know who's paying attention and who's FaceTiming friends. And we know that more than 25 percent of students in Los Angeles, for example, aren't even bothering to log on. Even parents who are monitoring their children's efforts cannot be certain that the kids are paying attention.
So, as they plan for their classes, teachers must ask themselves the librarian's questions:
What can I do to make material this appealing?
How can I persuade my students to invest their energies in this subject?
Swimming instructors are measured by results. If wannabe swimmers don't learn to swim, the instructor cannot claim, "I taught them effectively, so it's not my fault that they cannot swim." No, he or she has to find new ways to teach swimming, because the instructor owns the failure. In my experience, many teachers already think the way competent swimming instructors do. But not enough! Every teacher has to live by the mantra, "If they're not learning, then I am not teaching." Teachers need to assess frequently, take a clearheaded look at the results, and adapt accordingly.
Highway engineers—the men and women who design our roads and streets— have one important goal in mind: to get us safely from Point A to Point B. Because they know that drivers' attention wanders, highway engineers build roads whose lanes are about one-third wider than the cars that travel on them. Without that extra room for predictable error, we'd have many more highway accidents. Instead, nearly all of us arrive at our destinations safely.
Apply that to teaching and learning, and we will have an education system that treats failure as nothing more than an opportunity to try again. Perhaps you know the story of WD-40: If the chemical engineers who developed that ubiquitous product had been penalized for failing, work would have stopped after their first try, which they conveniently labeled "WD-1." Instead, they tried and failed 38 more times before hitting on a formula that worked!
Teachers, keep that in mind. Don't take it personally when a student doesn't get it the first time, or the fifth. Explore the reasoning behind the error, but not punitively. Celebrate wherever possible.
Gardeners understand that what they are involved in is a work in progress. And works in progress take time, faith, work, and love. The last thing a gardener would ever do is pull up the emerging plant or flower by the roots to see if it's growing. Nurturing is essential. That's true whether or not schools are open.
Gardeners know that roses demand one kind of attention, which is different from what green beans, tomatoes, and hydrangeas require. "One size fits all" doesn't apply to gardening or to teaching and learning. The educational equivalent of the gardener's mind are the questions: How is this child smart? What is she interested in? And what can I do to nurture her interests?
What's more, gardeners don't hover over their seedlings; they pay the appropriate amount of attention and then walk away, leaving nature, the sun, the earth, and the seeds to do the work of growing. To be like gardeners, teachers and parents cannot hover; they cannot expect students to be "on task" all the time. In fact, in these awful times, play and free time have never been more important.
To this day I remain grateful that Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Snow, Mr. McKinley, The Beezer, and other teachers at Taft approached the challenge of teaching me with determination, an ego-free attitude, humor, tolerance, and (dare I say it) love. Because they believed in me (against all evidence!), they refused to allow me to do substandard work, though Lord knows I tried.
While I'm certain that today's Taft students are equally blessed, for the nation to succeed those blessings must be widely available. Getting there will require more than resources. What's needed is the recognition on the part of voters, politicians, and policy makers that we simply cannot afford to waste human potential. If this paradigm shift occurs, it will be perhaps the pandemic's only gift.
John Merrow began his career as an education reporter with National Public Radio in 1974 and recently stepped down as president of Learning Matters, a nonprofit production company. In 2012, he became the first journalist to be honored with the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education, often referred to as "education's Nobel Prize." Since 1984, he has worked in public television as education correspondent for PBS NewsHour and as host of his own series of documentaries. His work has been recognized with Peabody Awards, Emmy nominations, and other reporting awards. An occasional contributor to the opinion pages of major U.S. newspapers, he is the author of several books, his most recent being Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education. He blogs weekly on The Merrow Report and lives in New York City with his wife.